You may misunderstand. Telephone numbers are a useful abstraction of an address for reaching someone and are portable. The portability of the service is the good thing. If your MESH and the contact catalog can do as much that will also be a good thing. From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 9, 2022 12:19 PM
To: pierce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay) <julien.maisonneuve@xxxxxxxxx>; Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx>; IETF Community <ietf@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Portable Internet Accounts Telephone numbers were invented when the switchboard operators couldn't remember all the subscriber names. The people were required to adapt to the machines, not the machines to the people. The telephone number fetish is the main thing I dislike in Signal. I pay quite a bit for telephone services which are ultimately little more than mapping a number onto what has been an Internet end point for a decade. If I call my mother in the UK, my cellular provider would charge me $1/minute for that. Worse still, there is no way for me to know what exorbitant rents are being extracted until the bill arrives. I really don't understand how people can for shame work for companies who still try to present customers with $20,000 bills for roaming charges as they pass through an airport. I am not really looking to replace Internet messaging here. I am looking to replace the telephone system whose decaying corpse has been giving off a terrible smell for decades now. Calling mother by Facetime works but it is inconvenient for her and will continue to be inconvenient until she can plug her landline handset into some box that can terminate Internet calls with the exact same ease as POTS. And she will be more than happy to buy such a device if it also gives her access to legacy telephone service for a reasonable cost which I would put at less than $10/year. Giving out my telephone number to establish a Signal call really doesn't work for me because now that other person has access to a personal communication device I carry with me that lacks access control on inbound calls. I subscribe to the various spam blocking services but even so, I am now getting a dozen nuisance calls a week. I don't want to give out my telephone number to anybody because for me, that is a technology that will be going away. People thought the Soviet Union would last forever. It didn't and there were vastly more powerful forces keeping that institution together. Part of inventing the future is extinguishing the past. +1 Portability is available within many jurisdictions for telephone numbers, but not for e-mail and other Internet-based service addresses. The contact catalog is a rational approach and puts the user in control of defining portable reachability. The point of eating the dog food is not because we like the flavor. The point is to learn from the experience. But the biggest hurdle were the jabber accounts, with servers disappearing or just not working
This is the single biggest problem with any new messaging or communications infrastructure. And it is fixable. Or at least I have a fix. It is a problem in SMTP email as well as Jabber. But not so much for the email service provider who regards it as 'customer retention'. My solution is to use cryptography to create an account for Alice that belongs to Alice alone, does not depend on her choice of service provider and can be used as an 'account for life'. This is of course tied to a root of trust that is a public signature key (Ed448 + Dilithium5). So having provisioned Alice with an account for life, we can then bind it to multiple account addresses as the fancy takes Alice. She can be alice@xxxxxxxxxxx and also alic3@xxxxxxxxxxx for her leet convos. And she can move to example.net without issue. The callsign registry if deployed would allow her to be just @alice and never pay a renewal fee. When Alice exchanges contacts with Bob, they exchange signed contact data that can include an 'update' URI. So if Alice switches her Jabber provider, Bob can still reach her. Same for if Alice switches protocols. So my vision for the contact catalog is that it becomes the launch center for all of Alice's communications apps. All Alice does is to select the person she wants to reach and the communication mode (chat, voice, video...). And the contacts app hands off to whatever app handles that for that particular contact. It is of course exactly the same scheme that Dan Connoly invented back in the day which we now know as the URI scheme identifier. And that is how I plan to implement it. scheme:user@authority:credential Aggressive interop: If a messaging provider doesn't specify a URI, one will be specified for them. While there are dozens and dozens of walled gardens, there are actually only a handful of actual protocols in use. Most people are using xmpp or noise underneath. I doubt anyone is using anything other than WebRTC for voice and video at this point. I have been seriously considering using XMPP for presence service and rejected it because I think we need to look at presence in a whole different way. If an application is going to have to maintain some constant connection to a static IP service in the routable Internet, I am going to leverage that to the hilt and use it for everything. I am going to use it for my TURN and DNS client-resolver and everything else I can think of. And then having compressed all of my signal into one channel, I can use TOR type techniques to resist traffic analysis in cases where that is appropriate. My problem with using Jabber at IETF was real, I do not have cause to use it outside IETF because all my other conversations take place over always secure channels. Retrofitting security to legacy protocols only worked once and that was HTTPS and it took over 20 years. So multiple IETFs, I would arrive with a laptop with either no jabber client or a jabber client trying to use a IDP that has shuttered. So I realize I need the client at the start of my first meeting. First spend time searching for the app for that machine, install, ok now 10 mins in. Then I have to futz about logging into the IETF meeting using an account at a completely different freaking service and for what? Why do I even need to authenticate as hallam@xxxxxxxxx to connect to a public meeting on the IETF service? So thirty minutes into the meeting I am still futzing with the Jabber client, now I am looking for a new IDP provider. And the first couple I tried are no longer in business either. By 45 minutes in, I give up and I don't try to use Jabber again for another year. We can't go on like this: No, it's not me, it's you. The only way I could possibly expect jabber to work the way I want it to is to run my own service. And I rather suspect that is what most people do. And I know that I could easily set up a service on my Digital Ocean droplet and solve MY problem, but in the process I have cut myself off from understanding what the typical user is experiencing.
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